I notice a lot of folks on this forum use Devexpress Xtrareports as their report writer. Having looked at a few report writers, I am now seriously considering XtraReports. One issue that would cause concern me is the apparent lack of support for Dot Matrix Printers. A lot of our users still use Dot Matrix printers and will not be convinced to change. I have seen a few threads on the Devexprress fora ehich suggest that Dot Matrix Printers are not supported. Wondering here if anybody knoes if that is the case, and if so, are there any workarounds .?

Hi Gerard,



XtraReports, like all reporting in Windows, doesn't print directly to any printer. It creates a common format file which is processed by printer specific drivers that physically handles the printing so, just as long as your system has a driver for the dot matrix printers, all should be ok.



I did a quick Google and this link is good overview of the process:



http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/citrix_metaframe_xp_advanced_technical_design_guide_including_feature_release_2/pages/how-windows-printing-really-works.aspx



Cheers, Peter

Hi Peter.  Thanks for coming back to eme

The reason I asked the question was that I had seen some posts on the Devexpress fora that sort of indicated there might be some issues with Dot Matrix printers. The ones we use (e.g. Epson, Oki  in VFP) have their own Windows drivers and for the most part work ok. I got a bit worried when I saw these posts and thought that there might be 'other' considerations' . Even though the Dot Matrix printers work , I've always had the view that they don't sit happily on top of Windows as they come form the old 'Dos' days

I've left a message with the Devexpress guys asking them to clarify what is the situation.

Hi Gerard.

Have you downloaded their trial version?

Hi Gerard,



A pretty good test would be to print various document types using the drivers you have to see how they perform, e.g. a text file, a spreadsheet, a Word document. If these print ok you are likely to be ok no matter what reporting tool you use.



Cheers, Peter

I dont have a problem printing to a dot matrix printer from other apps (e.g. Word, Excel, VFP etc). I had seen a dew threads on Devexpress where users could print ok from other apps but things like form feeding, paging etc were causing a problem just on XtraREports. These threads were going back a year or so. Anyway, I have left a message on their form and will update you on replies.

I have not downloaded a trial yet as I wanted to ensure there would be no show stoppers before investigating

XtraReports is well worth the money and head and shoulders above CrystalReports.  If you can print from the other applications I bet XtraReports wouldn't have any problems because it opens the exact same Windows print dialog as Word, Excel, etc.  We use XtraReports and our users love it.  However, now that I think about it I don't (or just haven't yet) used SF BO as the datasource, just becuase I usually end up writing custom views, stored procedures, or complex join statements for the reports and I have found simpler to just use a VS dataset. 

Jason Seidell

Programmer/Analyst

Infinedi

Thanks for all your replies re Xtra reports. I have downloaded a version and am doing some testing currenlty.

It would appear to be quite powerful although quite different to what I have been used to (R&R)

I would be interested in any Gotchas or any areas that cuase problems. Typicall we will need it to set up standard reports for our App, but also to embed it and let end users use it

The one problem that I just had to resolve with several of my reports, is starting with DX 9.3.4 they want the XtraReport datasource to be a DataSet and not a DataTable.  This would work in previous versions, but now the report will run ok but you only get one line in the report eventhough the datasource may contain more records.  The solution is to create a dataset with the datatable inside (make sure the datatable is named).  Set the DataSource to the dataset and the datamember to the datatable name.  As I mentioned previously, not a big problem for me since I was already using VS datasets, but perhaps a little more coding if your using SF BOs.

Jason Seidell

Programmer/Analyst

Infinedi

Hi Jason,



I use DataTables for DX Reports. There is quite a bit on DX Reports at the end of this SF post: http://forum.strataframe.net/Topic27535-7-3.aspx



However I did run into problems with DataSources and DataTables - this post on the DX Forum provided the answer for me: http://www.devexpress.com/Support/Center/p/Q254448.aspx



Cheers, Peter